Zepnido

Zepnido began as a marketplace of experts under the founders' own brand, launched as a beta in March 2013. The founders saw that trusted knowledge was getting lost in the noise of the social web, with fake news on Facebook and hundreds of thousands of cat videos on YouTube. Their goal was to help brands bring their audiences back to trusted sources of knowledge.

The founders made a clear pivot. Rather than selling expertise under their own name, they turned into a white-label software platform that large brands could use to run branded knowledge networks, with rooms, channels, training, and Q&A. Charles Thied, co-founder and CEO, described the product as behind-the-scenes white-label capability, with the client brand front and center. The company started selling this enterprise product in March 2014. The company also described a second product, Knowledge Feeds, which is closer to Slack and still in development.

Zepnido's early customers were large institutions. JP Morgan runs a thought-leadership network called UK Edge, which the company describes as a content marketing channel for driving leads. Other clients named in the interview include NASA and Springer Nature, a major STM publisher, and London Business School was a recent lead. The company sold mainly through founder-led direct sales. The founders, along with the head of product development, did sales themselves, and Thied estimated that about 80% of his own time went to sales. The company had hired a couple of salespeople the previous year but chose to build a repeatable sales process first.

The strongest growth lever was expansion within existing accounts. Springer Nature started with three knowledge networks and grew to close to 15, and the company reported net negative revenue churn, 100% renewal rates, and no lost customers since 2014. Contracts typically ran three years, with annual upfront payment in many cases. Customer acquisition was costly: for a £35,000-per-year deal, Thied estimated that the first year would not cover acquisition cost, and payback came afterward, which made upsell central. The company was still working on tracking acquisition cost more precisely.

As of the interview, Zepnido had 12 paying customers and about 12 team members based in London, with one person in Barcelona and affiliates in the US and Australia. The average customer paid roughly £60,000 to £70,000 per year, or about $70,000 in USD. Revenue was reported as close to £500,000 at the end of 2016, measured as annual recurring revenue because all contracts were annual. The host converted that to an estimated $550,000 to $700,000 USD depending on exchange rates. The company had raised about £650,000 from angels across three rounds, with a minimum investment of about £25,000 in the latest round.